It’s a Keynes observation from somewhere (I will come back and dig it up – if I find it now I will be late for the job I love oh-so-much).

People like predictability. Even if you are predictably wrong, that makes them happier than if you do some innovations that push them out of their comfort zones. Even if they intellectually concede (at least to your face) that they need to come out of those comfort zones.

excerpt: “But it remains true that Keynes’s dictum — “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally” – is probably even more true for politicians than it is for bankers. And this probably helps explain the persistence of the austerity cult despite years of failure. ”